This thesis explores the restoration and cultivation of mutually constitutive relationships between technique and identity. I begin by establishing the framework of practice that will be used throughout the thesis, in which I define practice by the methodological conditions of open-endedness, repeatability, intuition, situatedness and autonomy. I critique the practices of classical vocal pedagogy, the field of my own training and one about which critical scholarship is distinctly lacking. I argue that these practices effect a violentseparation between technique and identity (...) by means of the fetishisation of technique, ideologies of transcendence, structural whiteness and the reification that structures spaces of training and practice. I establish a theoretical framework, grounded in the work of Ben Spatz, for understanding the relationships between the repetition and sedimentation of technical knowledge and the always ongoing formation of identity, and explore the defetishisation of technique and the objects and practices in which it is encoded both in the university’s practice-as-research context and in the work of two artists and collaborators, Ragnar Kjartansson and Monia Sander Haj-Mohammed. Grounded in an intertextual reading of philosophies of immanence, philosophical pragmatism and feminist epistemology, I articulate the notion of situational emergence in processes of technical development and explore the broader scope and significance of lifelong transformation through technique. With this basis, I give an account of the works in the portfolio, exploring methodologies of defetishisation and situated making, and highlighting the ways that forms emerge in and through durational processes that are always specifically situated in time and place. (shrink)

Facing multiple challenges, from coronavirus to climate degradation, we need to reexamine where we are now and ask how individuals, organisations and society can move forward to a better future. Based on a model designed to encourage relational aspects of health care practice, we argue that the complexity of contemporary issues requires a holistic approach incorporating three different angles: organisational culture, personal development and specific spiritual competencies. We explore how our culture is out of balance and suggest ways to build (...) a better future. (shrink)

This paper conceptualises ‘knowledge exchange’ as the invention of new practices with reference to cultures of openness, a fluid relationality, boundary play and other tactical and strategic ‘space-acts’. The subject of the paper is the Centre for Creative and Cultural Knowledge Exchange, a partnership between the Universities of Bradford, Huddersfield, Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan. The CKE itself forms one node in HEFCE's 5 year initiative to establish a regionally and nationally operating network of 22 Centres of Knowledge Exchange between industry (...) and academia. This network is now in its fifth year of operation and provides fertile ground for empirical study. Through this paper the generative and transformative forces operating in, upon and through the CKE are revealed as a network of artefacts: new products, new systems and new tools; the relational interactions between universities, between networks of creative industries and other SMEs, as well as semi-autonomous peer2peer networks; and a variety of technical, legal and policy instruments. Together this ‘actant-rhizome’ creates and extracts values as it runs through organisational hierarchies, defines industrial districts, trespasses on and poaches in other territories, operates between regions and across disciplines, dis-locates and destabilises areas and zones. The case study concludes by developing these spatial concepts, to reveal the CKE, as an assemblage of networked flows that liquify space at a variety of scales and through variable speeds. This paper shows how it might be useful to move away from notions of innovation 'centres' and of notions of transfer and translation, instead imagining mobile emergent and fluid networks of people and their interactions; thinking of these as the sites and locus of innovation; and by focussing on the strategies and tactics of network practices, to rethink innovation as a network of disruptive space-acts. (shrink)

This thesis describes a project investigating conceptions of design in the community of design stakeholders. A 'democratization of design' is identified, in terms of a widened mode of design engagement. The origins of the project are located in the accompanying observation that 'design means different things to different people'. The project has three aims: to establish the contemporary UK context for the social study of design; to expand upon the identified theme of the democratization of design; and to empirically investigate (...) conceptions of design in the community of design stakeholders. The first two aims are fulfilled through a review and discussion of existing secondary sources. The third aim is fulfilled by primary research, in the form of an empirical interview study conducted with design stakeholder informants. The interview study embodies an interpretative phenomenological theoretical perspective, and employs qualitative research method. A theoretical sample of 31 interview informants was drawn from five design stakeholder groups: Business; Designers; Education; Promotion; Users. Conceptions of design within the collected interview data are investigated through a template analysis. An analysis of collected interview data is presented in the form of an holistic map or 'template' of the data organized by thematic discussion of 'design'. These empirical findings are presented and discussed narratively and graphically. A total of 41 interrelating 'conceptions of design' are identified. Empirical findings are synthesized with the response to aims and. This generates two main final research outcomes: firstly, a degree of informant scepticism and ambivalence is apparent towards the heightened political, cultural and economic profile for design; secondly, the democratization of design is seen as a worthy ideal, but one which is difficult to realize. In conclusion, a number of further implications of the project are also discussed. (shrink)

Discourse on benefit provision has long been a point of contention within political rhetoric. Although research has demonstrated the damaging impact that welfare cuts have had on people with disabilities, there has been a focus on the material impact of the deprivation such cuts have caused. In the context of welfare, mental health has received little attention in the research literature, often contextualised within the wider remit of disability, with little regard for the nuances of distress. There is a need (...) to consider this in the context of discourse, exploring issues of subjectivity, identity, power relationships and economic concerns. The first empirical study discursively explored how newspapers represent and position mental illness in regard to claiming benefits, neoliberal practices and the capitalist political economy. In ’Shame, Tragedy and the Neoliberal Ideal’. the social and political function of shame as a response to neoliberalism was explored. ‘Class and Classlessness’ explored how discourses of shame were deployed in regard to class and their implications for identity, citizenship and selfhood. The second empirical study discursively explored how mental health service-users who claim benefits negotiate identities and construct accounts of accessing the benefits system. A discourse of malign surveillance in the benefits system was explored, considering issues of deviance and social control. A discourse of ‘Consumerism and Alienation: A Breakdown in Society’ was also explored, where participants positioned themselves as ‘distanced’ and ‘outside’ of ‘human’. The data from both empirical studies were analysed using an innovative discursive method that was developed to engage with the ideas of both Foucault and Marx. The legitimisation of taken-for-granted assumptions regarding those with mental health difficulties who claim benefits was interrogated in a critically geared manner, whilst opening up spaces for empowerment, resistance, and social change. The thesis produces new knowledge regarding the interdiscursive relationship between disability and distress in the context of the welfare system, whilst exploring the potential of innovative and nuanced discursive methods. (shrink)

Nursing philosophy is fundamentally based on an ethos of holistic care. However, spiritual aspects of care are often neglected. There are questions about how spirituality is currently approached and to what extent student nurses feel competent in assessing and delivering spiritual care in practice. A literature review was performed, using a systematic approach. From the themes identified in the literature review, five major knowledge and practice gaps were noted in nurse education. These were: lack of ontological integration; lack in phenomenological (...) understanding; lack of support and environmental constraints; curriculum structure and unprepared Faculty. Developing competency to deal with spiritual issues in nursing education is still a challenge. Issues of conceptual clarity and articulation around the ontological and phenomenological aspects of nursing must be addressed to prepare nurses to provide truly holistic care, including spiritual and existential issues. Adequate preparation, environmental support for both nursing educators and students, and explicit representation of spirituality in the nursing curriculum will facilitate this. An emphasis on the philosophical underpinnings of nursing care is needed to rebalance existing nursing education to embrace caring for spiritual needs as part of holistic care. (shrink)

This paper conceptualises ‘knowledge exchange’ as the invention of new practices with reference to cultures of openness, a fluid relationality, boundary play and other tactical and strategic ‘space-acts’. The subject of the paper is the Centre for Creative and Cultural Knowledge Exchange, a partnership between the Universities of Bradford, Huddersfield, Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan. The CKE itself forms one node in HEFCE's 5 year initiative to establish a regionally and nationally operating network of 22 Centres of Knowledge Exchange between industry (...) and academia. This network is now in its fifth year of operation and provides fertile ground for empirical study. Through this paper the generative and transformative forces operating in, upon and through the CKE are revealed as a network of artefacts: new products, new systems and new tools; the relational interactions between universities, between networks of creative industries and other SMEs, as well as semi-autonomous peer2peer networks; and a variety of technical, legal and policy instruments. Together this ‘actant-rhizome’ creates and extracts values as it runs through organisational hierarchies, defines industrial districts, trespasses on and poaches in other territories, operates between regions and across disciplines, dis-locates and destabilises areas and zones. The case study concludes by developing these spatial concepts, to reveal the CKE, as an assemblage of networked flows that liquify space at a variety of scales and through variable speeds. This paper shows how it might be useful to move away from notions of innovation 'centres' and of notions of transfer and translation, instead imagining mobile emergent and fluid networks of people and their interactions; thinking of these as the sites and locus of innovation; and by focussing on the strategies and tactics of network practices, to rethink innovation as a network of disruptive space-acts. (shrink)

At last year‘s conference, we outlined an approach to narrative research which we call Narrative Oriented Inquiry. We see this as a dynamic framework for good practice, ie. a psychological approach developed with respect to research on personal narratives which offers a distinctive and critical framework to narrative inquiry. In this paper we want to explore how our approach can be used to explore the narrative intelligence that is at work in our everyday lives. We argue that the first steps (...) in narrative data analysis offer crucial insight into how people exhibit this intelligence. Indeed, a relatively straightforward distinction between fabula and sjuzet can be used to reveal the identity positioning at play in a narrator‘s constructions. Taking an example from an interview with an elderly man, who is outlining his life journey with particular emphasis on the life events that influenced and changed the course of his career, we demonstrate NOI in action. The data analysis especially focuses upon the subtle ways in which NK participates in his own constructions of self. (shrink)

I start from the principle that composition is a historical lineage of techniques that have traditionally been applied to music but need not be. To illustrate this, I apply composition principles to the writing of this PhD thesis. In describing this process, I draw parallels between the music work I have composed during 2013-2017 and the process of thesis writing. Along the way, I show how quantization is not only central to my composition practice but fundamental to the act of (...) composing; I rethink the basic epistemological principles of PhD research, using John Cage's ideology of chance and Arthur Koestler's idea of bisociation; I develop a new set of categories for classifying artworks that use combinatorics, under the umbrella neologism 'completism'; expand upon James Tenney's ideas to create a new typology of musical form based on completist principles; and finish by composing the bibliography, font, page-layout, semantics, word choice, and syntax of the Conclusion of this thesis. (shrink)

The quantification of everyday life, also known as self-tracking, is an increasingly popular activity. Forbes’ technology enthusiast Ewan Spence claimed that 2014 was “the year of wearable technology”. In that year, Google, Android, and Intel, all released new wearable self-tracking devices. Two years later the fast food chain McDonald’s offered free “Step-It” self-trackers in children’s meals. These devices count calorie consumption, steps walked, stairs climbed, social activities, and more. Problematically, these emergent wearable self-tracking devices are routinely framed as ways to (...) manage, optimise, and enhance, the self. This is evident in commercial scenarios as well as in academic discourses. Whilst this nascent topic is yet to be explored in critical depth there is already a particular habit of thought being established. These studies focus analytically on the functionalist accuracy of devices, as well as the effects of the collisions between human-and-device. In this way, they are limited to what is possible with self-tracking, and what is potential — such as the creative, speculative, transgressive, anti-traditional, etc. — is backgrounded. Philosophically, through the meta-mechanics of design, self-tracking can be rearticulated as an everyday creative practice. In doing so, new philosophical potentials, material relations, and political agonisms, are foregrounded and the creative potentials of difference-making gain greater potency. (shrink)

Design​ ​is​ ​a​ ​bastard​ ​practice,​ ​it​ ​is​ ​fundamentally​ ​detached​ ​from​ ​its​ ​own​ ​inherited​ ​ethos​ ​so as​ ​to​ ​appear​ ​progressive,​ ​virtuous​ ​and​ ​fashionable.​ ​Such​ ​abstinence​ ​from​ ​knowledge and​ ​past​ ​experience​ ​models​ ​a​ ​practice​ ​that​ ​advocates​ ​competition​ ​over​ ​communion​ ​–​ ​a renunciation​ ​of​ ​experience​ ​and​ ​sanction​ ​of​ ​illusory​ ​solutionism.​.

Self-tracking most notably emerged over the last century. To self-track is to record life activities, encoding them into a series of quantified variables–or what has been called “health” and “lifestyle” data. Commonly, this is practiced with wearable de- vices, such as wristbands, necklaces, pendants, and badges, which are tethered to smartphones and personal computers. Through these devices, a meal is measured by its calorific quantity, a heartbeat measured by its rate, and sitting at a desk is rendered the calculable accumulation (...) of inactivity. Yet, this perspective on health and lifestyle is not particularly new. Defining food as energy, knowing the importance of a regular heart rate and the value of exercise are staple points of advice in general medical practice. However, these are no longer exclusively “medical␣ perceptions. (shrink)

Self-trackers are a diffuse and diverse group that quantify their lives. From the ordinary to the extraordinary, intimate and vital happenings that occur on -empirical planes are cast as legible events. Blood pressure, heartbeat rate, testosterone levels, posture, diet, muscle tension, social activity, geographical position. These are now happenings to be intervened upon and rendered as units of measurement and comparable variables. These measurements may give insight to help rebuild a re-cognition of oneself, or allow a brooding recall of lost (...) moments – this is the manifest quantified body, a body read and a body written. Yet the quantified body is a veneer, it is the outward appearance of control, awareness and care-for-self: we were cynical subjects long before we were quantified bodies. However, self-tracking intrinsically disassociates from the ubiquitous cynical condition. The cynical self-tracker gropes for independence whilst submitting to a life of mediated self-discovery, it is a renunciation of independent vitality so as to act “as if”, to appear to be whilst never being – to fall short of realising difference. It is argued here that the quantified body allocates us all to be designers – reading and writing in culture. And as such, our actions must be critiqued as a symptom of a design practice, where the condition of subjectivity is at the forefront of value-making in taste, style and fashion. How does the cynic self-track? What is the value of design in the field of new media and digital culture? (shrink)

An introduction to the genealogical method when conducting a history of self-tracking practices.

The inevitability of failure — and its quantification — in the vital processes of life.

An introduction to Viém Flusser's 1966 essay "On Fiction".

A keynote Speech at the 2017 Annual Conference of the Society for Photographic Education, Orlando Florida. Using Jacques Rancière’s theoretical development of an a priori logic of an equality of intelligence, I will examine how an assumed equality of intelligence, applied across all the various forms of photography can provide a more productive framework to consider how images are used and reused. It will be argued that by assuming this a priori logic, we can move the debate beyond questions that (...) are concerned with the originality of an image or its status as document and allows for a reconsideration of its use as a catalyst for debate. What is called for is a photographic discourse that reformulates the role of documentary photography as a means to engage with the reader’s imagination as an explicit challenge to perception. This new discourse re-frames the photograph as a vehicle for debate, as a discursive document. (shrink)

In philosophy of science, there have been two different starting points for epistemology: Platonism and Aristotelianism. These two alternative starting points have played a major role also in the formation of fundamental ideas of engineering and management generally as well as in relation to construction. It is contended that an overly Platonic influence on engineering and management has created a number of problems. For solving these problems, beyond mere patching, a more balanced take on Platonism and Aristotelianism is needed.

Deleuze and Derrida’s philosophical friendship, though somewhat distant, was queerly convivial in character. Their mutual hostility towards conceptual stasis, overly linear approaches to temporality and excessively centered notions of the subject targeted a number of common philosophical opponents - and they were likewise united in their affirmation of difference. However, as might be expected of any post-structural alliance, this apparent unity of purpose arose out of some seemingly incommensurable tensions: Deleuze’s mode of ontological enquiry squared poorly with Derrida’s rejection of (...) metaphysics; Deleuze’s positive engagement with the sciences, and his prioritisation of material-sensation sat awkwardly with Derrida’s more pervasively textual and somewhat idealist orientation; and Deleuze’s development of an impersonal concept of Husserlian expression served to check Derrida’s rather more stringent and single minded rejection of phenomenological presentism. However, despite his veneration of art, creativity and material-sensation, it is important to remember that, like Derrida, Deleuze was predominately a writer – albeit a writer with an at once affective, performative and corporeal agenda. Indeed, when taken at face value, it would seem to be Derrida who most fully explored the artistic potentialities of experimental writing. Deleuze’s emphasis upon performativity, emergence, and onto-genetic construction nevertheless serves to extend and supplement the Derridean account of textuality by exposing its neglect of the process of writing. In so doing it foregrounds the potential for Deleuzo-Derridean thought to instantiate a genuinely aesthetico-conceptual image of thought. This paper attempts to determine the extent to which assemblages of conceptual, aesthetic and performative practice inspired by Deleuzo-Derridean thought might fulfill the promise of artistic research. (shrink)

Artwork based on a piece of ancient Buddhist philosophy, to display as part of an interior design project, at the Manchester Buddhist Centre.

Brass Art in Conversation with Roger Malbert An evening of in conversation with the artists Brass Art led by Roger Malbert to accompany the solo exhibition at the International 3, Manchester. Roger Malbert is Head of Hayward Touring at the Southbank Centre, London. He has organised and co-curated many exhibitions and written catalogue essays on artists including Matta, Richard Wentworth and Tacita Dean. He is the author of ‘Drawing People: The Human Figure in Contemporary Art’, published by Thames & Hudson, (...) 2015. Brass Art is the collaborative practice of Chara Lewis, Kristin Mojsiewicz and Anneké Pettican. Exhibitions include: The Imagining of Things HAG, Flights of Fancy Tatton Park Biennial, Dark Matters The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, Skyscraping Yorkshire Sculpture Park,, The Jerwood Drawing Prize, London. Selected presentations include: Folds in Time: artists’ responses to the temporal and the uncanny, Freud Museum, London, CHArt Conformity, Process and Deviation Kings College Festival of the Humanities, London, Siggraph Los Angeles ; Technologies of Drawing European Sculpture Network, ISEA2010:RUHR Dortmund, Germany. Brass Art has received numerous awards including: Arts Council England, British Council, Association of Art Historians, Friends of Yorkshire Sculpture Park and AHRC. Their work is held in a number of public and private collections. (shrink)

The moving-image and sonic work Freud’s House The Double Mirror was selected for exhibition in the International Symposium of Electronic Art 2016, Hong Kong, by peer reviewed jury. The project forms part of the larger ‘Shadow Worlds | Writers’ Rooms’ trilogy. “This project taps into the almost mystical revererence we have for the domestic and work spaces of famous people…especially in light of the subject matter, and the manner of execution. The dreamy quality of the pointcloud imagery and ghostly presences (...) are quite fitting...This vein of activity does a lot to bring together cultural heritage and new media art considerations, fields that are too often too far apart in practice, considering how productive their mutual engagement can be, as seen in this example.” Dr Harald Kraemer, Curator ISEA 2016 Daniel C. Howe, Art Program Chair ISEA 2016. (shrink)

One of the general aims of any science is to concern itself with the distinction between what is real and actual as opposed to what is but merely apparent. In this sense it seems gratuitous to announce that one intends to be realistic about scientific endeavour: to adopt a scientific approach is simply to refuse to be the dupe of mere appearance. The zealous pursuit of the true, the real and the actual, or of the essential as opposed to the (...) epiphenomenal can, however, be subverted and diverted in many ways. In this article we examine various aspects of this problem in relation to legal science, and more specifically to the theories and methodologies associated with Legal Realism. (shrink)

This article seeks to understand sustainable tourism consumption through the lens of existentialism. Netnography of backpackers on an extended vacation reveals both existential anxiety and authenticity motivate and shape travel. This in turn has implications for the relative sustainability of otherwise of tourism consumed.

Forget about mindfulness and clean eating – at a time when we appear to be experiencing rising levels of anxiety, narcissism and unhappiness, existentialism may be the philosophy to adopt to improve your mental well-being.

This paper proposes to explore, through new materialist insights drawn from art and neuroscience, an alternative imaging/imagining of brain plasticity. Such a reading presents the brain image in and through enactments of the brainbody; a phenomenon which accounts for the brain’s own entanglement with ‘bodies, mind, behavior, socio-cultural contexts, and meaning-making’. The paper will examine curatorial strategies deployed by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, in particular, insights generated out of dOCUMENTA and the 14th Istanbul Biennial SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms. These international (...) exhibitions engage a diffractive methodology of reading through the form-iterations generated by the brain on socio-cultural and psychic levels. Secondly, analysis of a recent film by Ursula Biemann and Mo Deiner entitled Twenty-One Percent, presents an approach to artistic research where the brainbody phenomenon and agential matter meet through the chemical compound structure of the body and its intra-celestial relationship to the universe. Finally, the paper will consider brain imaging technologies in the context of The Human Connectome Project, and to the ways in which a reading of this brain – as a collective speculative fiction of newly discovered regions – could think neuronal imaging beyond the formal necessities of neuroscience and into the spaces of our plastic imaginations. By rethinking the historical and contemporary technologies and apparatuses of brain imaging through the channels of artistic research, a diffractive imaginary for sculptural plasticity will be realised. (shrink)

In a diverse range of recent research activities, I have worked to develop productive distinctions between embodied knowledge, embodied practice, embodied technique, and embodied research; but I have settled for a brief gloss of the crucial descriptor ‘embodied’.1 In this essay I offer a critical and philosophical approach to embodiment, explaining why we continue to need this concept and what I believe it can still do for us.

The field of entrepreneurial education has struggled with fundamental questions in regards to the subject’s nature and purpose – to whom and for what means are educational agendas ultimately directed; these questions have become of central importance to policy makers, practitioners and academics alike in the context of the dynamic nature of the business world. Concerns have been expressed about University Business schools engaging more critically with the lived experiences of practicing entrepreneurs through alternative pedagogical approaches and methods, seeking to (...) account for and highlighting the social, political and moral aspect of management practice. For example, in the United Kingdom where funding in higher education has become increasingly dependent on student fees there are renewed pressures to educate students for management practice as opposed to educate them about management and what it does. This latter point will be the main focus of this workshop and one which demands the inclusion of critique. Government and EU policies are calling on Business Schools to develop and enhance entrepreneurial skill sets, in order to meet these challenges entrepreneurial focused education programs must be more proactive in providing innovative educational practices that helps and facilitates life experiences and experiential learning. (shrink)

This paper provides a philosophical conceptualisation of how learners engage in entrepreneurial learning from within by focusing on the role of the inner identity and mission of the learner. Klapper and Neergaard add ‘withness’ to the learning frameworks of EE, but there is hardly any literature discussing the implications of learning from within in this context. Fayolle calls for investigating how learners learn in order to address the vast differences among audiences in EE, and understand the rationale behind ‘effective didactical (...) design’. This paper adopts a postmodernist perspective to understand the role of self in EE, and draws on the Learning Onion Model for learning from within. A mystagogical perspective is proposed to help learners engage with their inner missions and identities, and improve their core reflection skills, thus, highlighting and inspirational dimension to EE. (shrink)

Interviewed in 2012 for Cinéma du Réel, the international documentary film festival in Paris, Chantal Akerman said ‘I think all great fiction films have something of documentary’. Two examples she chose as illustrations were F.W. Murnau’s Tabu and Robert Bresson’s Au Hassard Balthazar. Chantal Akerman has spoken about the role played by Tabu in her free adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel Almayer’s Folly but has been less direct about the example of Bresson’s filmmaking for her own. Taking as case studies (...) La Captive and La Folie Almayer the intention of this paper is to draw out some relations between Akerman, Murau and Bresson in their approach to storytelling in film. In so doing it might be possible to argue, with the support of a recently published essay by Italian political philosopher Olivia Guaraldo, that in between documentary and fiction, so marked in Chantal Akerman’s filmmaking is the setting for the ‘scandalous property’ of ‘realness’ Hannah Arendt understood as politics. (shrink)

The concepts of the algorithmic and the mechanical express a set of common processual concerns whilst cutting idiosyncratically across ideal and material planes. As descriptors of internal and external influence, the notions of the relational and the parametric are implicated in the genesis and transformation of twenty first century life. What then, are the qualities of the contemporary city symphony? Is it the algo and the mech that serve primarily to sonify the everyday? This talk will examine the contemporary interest (...) in process-philosophical notions of rhythm, relation and parameter in the context of making - exploring the ways in which such ideas are reflected, refracted and contorted in both hacktivist and institutional contexts. (shrink)

This talk will place martial arts practice and studies in the context of an ongoing sea change in the university as a social institution. A generation of embodied practitioners — across the martial, healing, performing, ritual arts and more — is entering academia. Individually these hybrid scholar-practitioners and artist-researchers are developing exciting new ways of combining theory and practice, or of transcending or cutting through that binary altogether. But in many cases such innovative methodologies lack historical context and are not (...) yet in conversation across disciplines. Drawing on the framework of social epistemology developed in What a Body Can Do, this presentation will argue for an understanding of martial arts themselves as active fields of knowledge sustained by a dialectical relationship between training and research. According to this model, martial arts studies is to martial arts practice as performance studies is to performing arts and as science studies is to scientific research. Once we place martial arts practice in this context and examine its interdisciplinary relationships both to conventional academic disciplines and to neighboring fields of embodied research, a host of new questions arises regarding the ethical, political, and epistemological role of embodied research in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

“Sequence of Four Exercise-Actions” is a dense linear video document based on an extract from a session of physical training held at the Centre for Psychophysical Performance Research, University of Huddersfield. The session was led by Ben Spatz, Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance, and is based on a form of physical training developed by Massimiliano Balduzzi, which Spatz previously documented and analyzed in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 5:3. This training can be used to enhance a performer’s physical (...) precision and sense of musicality as well as the ability to integrate dynamic movement with interpersonal awareness and imaginative associations. Also participating in the training session are Sobhia Jones and Chris Lomax. In addition to sharing a moment of studio-based pedagogy and another glimpse of Balduzzi’s exercise-actions, the purpose of this video is to explore how layers of textual commentary and embedded video citation can increase the density of a video document to level appropriate for rigorous scholarship. The implicit argument is that scholarly videos should be to mainstream documentaries what scholarly monographs are to popular nonfiction books, i.e. more densely saturated with knowledge. Extending the argument put forward in the book What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research, I demonstrate here how the field of embodied research can be supported by an approach to video documentation that focuses neither on the ephemerality of the live event nor on the specific formal qualities of video as a medium, but rather on how best to expose the density of specialized embodied practice. The main video shows Spatz demonstrating solo work on a sequence of four exercise-actions. Jones can be seen matching Spatz’s rhythmic impulses while she observes from the side, while in the latter part of the video Lomax takes a turn in solo practice of the same sequence. Additional layers of epistemic density that provide contextualization and analysis of the core video include: textual annotation indicating the names of practitioners and exercises; textual references, as would commonly be founded in footnotes; embedded videos from other parts of the same training session, showing the layered density of technique within a given practice session; embedded videos and imagery from external sources, locating the documented practice in a wider epistemic context; textual commentary explicating all of the above; and continuous time code allowing others to make stable references to specific sections of this video. (shrink)

There are few non-medical reflections on haemophilia and chronic bleeding disorders, and what there is often turn out to be wrong, outdated, or fanciful. CBDs are often hidden experiences, aside from the lack of treatment in literature, academic or not. This article re-frames CBDs through a philosophical, yet subjective, treatment that seeks to describe it as a cluster of experiences that often step outside of the bounds of the medical definition. Why have CBDs been so elusive? Partly because of their (...) multi-layered, temporally structured, socially organized ontology, which makes them hard to define, locate, and reduce to one clear-cut perspective. Are they in the genes, in actual bleedings, in secondary disabilities, in the social adjustments involved, in iatrogenic complications; or are they to be located in the joints, the liver, or other organs that may be affected as a consequence of treatments? Do they affect individuals, families, genetic carriers, sexual partners, or even future generations? Drawing partly upon personal history, conversations, semi-structured interviews, published biographical narrations, and the shared experience of patients’ groups, the article amends some misinterpretations and captures salient aspects of this illness experience. (shrink)

The metaphorical example... of a fertilized egg which differentiates into a fully formed organism, can now be made quite literal: the progressive differentiation of the spherical egg is achieved through a complex cascade of symmetry-breaking phase transitions. Manuel DeLanda This paper will explore the ontology of song through the Deleuzian philosophies put forward by Manuel DeLanda and Elizabeth Grosz, with a focus on symmetry breaking and the fractal structure of knowledge. Extending a notion I first put forward in What a (...) Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research, I argue that embodied research explores relatively reliable potentialities of human practice in a way that is closely analogous to laboratory research as understood by social and historical epistemologies. DeLanda’s rigorously analytical interpretation of Deleuze will form the basis of my proposal, while Grosz’s more impressionistic discussion in Chaos, Territory, Art will provide additional background for theorising the functionality of song as action. While a typology of songs would aim to categorise and order songs as coherent units, a topology of song is concerned with the processual generation of song in time—that is, with defining the phase space of song into which individual songs, song fragments, and song-actions intervene. From this perspective, song is not an “object” in Graham Harman’s speculative sense but more like a Deleuzian “zone of intensity” or what Hans-Jörg Rheinberger calls an “epistemic thing.” While song as a cultivated organic resource may attain sufficient temporary individuality to be called upon at will, and thereby function as a relatively reliable bodily affordance, this individuality is nothing more than what DeLanda refers to as the virtual topological structure of a multiplicity. Hence, singing is an example of “the actualisation of the virtual in time” and the specific acts of symmetry breaking that we call “songs” are newly enacted each time we begin to sing—just as a natural symmetry returns in every moment of silence. In the case of song, silence is precisely analogous to DeLanda’s undifferentiated topological “egg.” My presentation will include live vocal performance excerpts drawing on the ongoing embodied research project “Judaica,” which seeks to develop a technique of song-based practice grounded in the coordination of voice, movement, and association in the complete unit of human performance that twentieth-century theatre pioneers Konstantin Stanislavsky and Jerzy Grotowski called “action.” I will demonstrate how vocal actions may use rhythm, melody, timbre, and other embodied techniques to generate the symmetry-breaking events that we experience as song. I contend that the flexibility of song across these and other dimensions derives from its topological structure, a fact that is routinely concealed by the epistemological dominance of recorded audio tracks and written scores in the study of music. My analysis of song is intended to re-examine and foreground the centrality of embodied technique in human life and to support innovative analyses of embodied practice, which I see as fundamental to the future of artistic research. (shrink)

For more than a decade now a steadily growing chorus of voices has announced that the 'postmodern' literature, art, thought and culture of the late 20th century have come to an end. At the same time as this, the early years of the 21st century have seen a stream of critical formulations proclaiming a successor to postmodernism. Intriguing and exciting new terms such as 'remodernism', 'performatism', 'hypermodernism', 'automodernism”, 'renewalism', 'altermodernism', 'digimodernism' and 'metamodernism' have been coined, proposed and debated as terms (...) for what comes after the postmodern. Supplanting the Postmodern is the first anthology to collect the key writings in these debates in one place. The book is divided into two parts: the first, 'The Sense of an Ending', presents a range of positions in the debate around the demise of the postmodern; the second, 'Coming to Terms with the New', presents representative writings from the new '–isms' mentioned above. Each of the entries is prefaced by a brief introduction by the editors, in which they outline its central ideas, point out the similarities and/or differences from other positions found in the anthology, and suggest possible strengths and limitations to the insights presented in each piece. (shrink)

Stanley Cavell and Jacques Derrida both came to Hamlet comparatively late in their careers, and in both cases, their writings on Hamlet are somewhat peripheral to their philosophical projects. However, reframing their readings of this play through their writings on Austin’s concept of performativity can, as this paper will show, lead to a surprising reappraisal of their views on Shakespeare’s masterpiece, which in turn frames the concept of performativity in a new light. Austin was notoriously dismissive of performatives spoken on (...) stage; Derrida’s Signature Event Context challenges him on this view; Cavell’s “What Did Derrida Want of Austin?” aims to show how Derrida’s critique misses its mark. Curiously, however, when writing on Hamlet, it is Cavell – perhaps the foremost of Austin’s inheritors – who takes up Hamlet as a means of taking Austin’s formulation to task, while Derrida – perhaps the foremost of Austin’s critics – takes up Hamlet as an opportunity subtly to revisit his earlier critique in ways far more receptive to the idea of performativity. For example, Derrida’s readings of Hamlet explicitly call attention to scenes involving classic performatives such as the swearing of oaths, or bearing witness. Yet, as the quotation in my title indicates, Hamlet has its own ideas of how performativity works. Cavell’s precept that Shakespeare’s plays offer investigations of their own theatricality gives us to see that Hamlet takes up the very issues that troubled Austin, including speaking performatives on stage, and swearing to things with the tongue but not the mind. Cavell and Derrida’s readings of Hamlet, then, show us that the play is an invitation to revisit the concept of performativity, yet the play itself does so in ways perhaps more destabilising to the idea of performativity than Cavell and Derrida might have realised. (shrink)

The case studies in this book illuminate how arts and humanities tropes can aid in contextualizing Digital Arts and Humanities, Neogeographic and Social Media activity and data through the creation interpretive schemas to study interactions between visualizations, language, human behaviour, time and place.

This paper looks at the art and philosophy of German fluxus artist Joseph Beuys and relates this to current debates in the Digital Arts and Humanities. Beuys coined a number of grassroots concepts, such as the 'social sculpture.' With this he referred to the potential of art to transform society, art as a social product, i.e., sculptures in which the onlookers are part of the artwork, and the potential of every person to be an artist. His often misconstrued punchline of (...) 'everyone is an artist' is an extension of Marcel Duchamps' 'Ready Made' art, in which anything can be art; i.e., what Beuys proposed was rather that 'anyone can be an artist.' This chapter looks at the similarities between Beuys' work and Social Media and Digital Humanities, in how far his concept of the 'Social Sculpture' can inform the two. (shrink)

Using Jacques Rancière’s theoretical development of an a priori logic of an equality of intelligence, I will examine how an assumed equality of intelligence, applied across all the various forms of photography can provide a more productive framework to consider how images are used and reused. It will be argued that by assuming this a priori logic, we can move the debate beyond questions that are concerned with the originality of an image or its status as document and allows for (...) a reconsideration of its use as a catalyst for debate. What is called for is a photographic discourse that reformulates the role of documentary photography as a means to engage with the reader’s imagination as an explicit challenge to perception. This new discourse re-frames the photograph as a vehicle for debate, as a discursive document. (shrink)

This essay extends the epistemology of practice put forward in *What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research* through a detailed application of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s social and historical epistemology to a 2011 solo performance by the author at Movement Research in New York City. Whereas *What a Body Can Do* surveys a range of historical and contemporary practices, this article attempts for the first time to enact a close technical and epistemic reading of the author’s own embodied (...) research. Eleven minutes of practice are analyzed in what the author, following Rheinberger, calls the phenomenotechnical mode. The article works to distinguish this mode of analysis from more prevalent approaches such as those associated with phenomenology, semiotics, and cognitive studies. In addition to suggesting how a rigorous phenomenotechnical analysis might be applied to one’s own embodied practice, the article offers insight into a specific line of embodied inquiry in post-Grotowskian song-action, with supporting photo and video documentation. (shrink)

This article proposes to explore, through a series of intra-connected examples drawn from art and culture, an alternative imaging of brain plasticity. Taking influence from current discourses on the brainbody phenomenon, a diffractive methodology of reading will be explored through the mediations of the brain in culture, that is, through specific curatorial and artistic mechanisms which have sought to think the historical and contemporary technologies and apparatuses of neuroscience otherwise. There are five key examples that help to situate the phenomenon (...) of plasticity as the reception, production and annihilation of form in the worlds of art and culture, with the aim of revisiting the brain image from out of these spaces. The first presents a scientific-anthropological account of how PET scanning works, in particular, how a brain image is constructed from the technical and scientific processes involved. This provides a particular way of understanding the brain-as-image. The second provides a comparative analysis between different types of brain culture within exhibition environments. This draws upon the discourses of exchange between cultural artefacts, neuroscience and learning. The third example looks to the curatorial strategies deployed by Caroyln Christov-Bakargiev, in particular, the form iterations generated out of dOCUMENTA and the 14th Istanbul Biennial SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms. These international exhibitions engage with a diffractive methodology of reading through the intra-active exchanges between art, neuroscience and neuroaesthetics in particular. The fourth example explores a recent film by Ursula Biemann entitled Twenty One Percent. This is a return to the brainbody phenomenon and to the articulations of agential matter through the chemical compound structure of the body and its intra-celestial relationship to the universe. Biemann’s video essay will be considered as a specific type of diffractive reading which works inside the body. The final example makes a return to brain imaging technology in the context of The Human Connectome Project, to the ways in which a reading of this brain – as a collective speculative fiction of newly discovered regions – might think neuronal imaging otherwise, beyond the formal necessity of the brain imaging environment and into the spaces of our embodied imaginations. These are projects which have sought to explore the intersections between art and science, and which lend themselves to a reading that is entangled with differing perspectives and disciplines. (shrink)

This case study will address the diffractive patterns of exchange shaped between sculptural formations of plasticity in the context of the phenomenon of the ‘brain-body-in-culture’: a double condition where formations and transformations of human and non-human activity are in continuous intra-action. Three examples - aided by the writings of Catherine Malabou and Karen Barad - will provide instances of and for a diffractive mode of spectatorship, where space, sensorium and the social are cut through with new acts of plastic formation (...) in the brain. The first example considers Socrates’ cataleptic condition in The Symposium. Read through what Malabou describes as ‘explosive plasticity’, these ‘fits of abstraction’ are conditions of possibility for synaptic spacing in the brain. Catalepsy and the wounded are bound by an ethics of ‘regenerative repair’ – the sculpting and re-sculpting of the brain in the aftermath of a rupture. The second example explores the intra-active mattering of the universe in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, in particular, Antoine Roquentin’s encounter with a pebble – a nonhuman iteration. This exposure to an existential futurity – the death-drive of the Anthropocene – where plastics and plasticity are caught in a battle between the brain and the environment. The third example explores walking and migration in the new hinterlands of the twenty-first century. Francis Alÿs’ work provides one avenue of exploration into public space and the intra-actions forged between history, culture and migrations of the mind. Sculptural thinking is enacted in and through a morphology of the line in the landscape. Whether urban, rural, physical or digital, the environment shapes our plastic ability to receive and produce form. The social and sensorial is shaped by our encounters with space. (shrink)

This paper takes an experimental teaching session that involved a silent excursion into the UK’s Peak District as a starting point to consider the relationship between embodied and ecological pedagogies. Human society today faces an undeniable ecological crisis owing to overexploitation of natural resources. While environmental science and activism offer important aspects of the solution to this crisis, this paper asks whether pedagogies of embodied practice may also have a valuable role to play. Following a brief introduction to the historical (...) role of natural ecology in some lineages of performance training, the paper cites student testimonies from the experimental teaching session in order to investigate how non-instrumental practices of this kind could make a meaningful pedagogical contribution to the development of ecological consciousness in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

I am a contemporary visual arts practitioner collecting letters of lost love memories and utilising emotional objects to create a series of artefacts that embody past relationships. These artefacts act as a shrine or reliquary symbolising the feelings of the lost love. Hosting ‘Lost Love Cafes’ and creating ‘Love Donation Boxes’ has allowed individuals to contribute their stories through written letter or oral interview. Investigating into three types of love, familial, platonic and romantic, in conjunction with loss has allowed stories (...) of partners, friendships, parents and relatives to be submitted. Analysis of the letters is on going, focusing on key moments, objects and feelings that inform design experimentation. These will form the basis for 9 artefacts, 3 of each love type. Each artefact will differ dependant on type of connection and time or emotion invested within different relationships. The N-Exlace has been created as an experimental piece based around a personal lost love. Using diary entries, photographs and love letters allowed me to re-connect with the emotions of the relationship, working with key events, objects and literature allowed the analysis to direct the design of the neckpiece. Working in translucent silicone allows impressions of objects to be captured leaving a ghostly trace like old memories and natural leather ages becoming imprinted like our own skin. I would like to propose an interactive talk, with elements of an installation and lost love story collection workshop, discussing previous work and process as to how letters of lost love are used to create emotional artefact. Concluding with a lost love writing session posing a series of thought provoking questions to encourage thought on familial, friendship or romantic lost love. These can be submitted to the Lost Love project if desired. (shrink)

Stuart Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces and Emile Cohl's Fantasmagoria are each positioned in histories of animation as seminal examples of the animated film. However, despite a number of apparent similarities, Blackton and Cohl's animations would seem to express a radically divergent set of ontological commitments. Cohl offers the audience an experience of chaotic, mutable, relational complexity that revels in its incoherence, whilst Blackton presents a series of more straightforward set pieces, dwelling for the most part upon object-centric representational (...) form - or on what Deleuze and Guattari term the faciality of a subject. Whilst it is well known that Deleuze devoted very little space to the discussion of animation, a number of attempts have been made - most noteably by Schaffer and Lamarre - to construct a Deleuzian position in animation theory. Schaffer's account is strongly Bergsonian, developing a form of phenomenal, durational subjectivity, and stressing the temporal disparities between the mode of production and the mode of projection. In contrast to this, we find a more impersonal approach to the animated image developed in the work of Lamarre, which stresses the importance of the non-Euclidian, differential and affective qualities of the plastic line. This is then extended into a Deleuzo-Guattarian commentary upon the coordination of strata that takes place in animation - begining with consideration of the animation stand as apparatus, going on to explore the relational confluence that coordinates the multilayered composite image, and then spilling back out into the world in an exploration of expanded modes of animation, embracing cosplay and fanfiction. Despite the differences in their approach, Schaffer and Lamarre are united in their concern with animated affect. Indeed, consideration of the work of Cohl and Blackton serves to facilitate a rich discussion of Deleuze's concept of relation in the context of animation - drawing attention not only to the many axes of animation's relational mutability and affective force, but also to Deleuze's somewhat ambivalent reaction to semiotics. That is to say, in the discussion of the Deleuzo-Guattarian account of faciality, signs are positioned negatively, as instantiating semiotic regimes, whilst in context of Deleuze's development of material-semiotics, the sign is venerated as that which most closely approximates the workings of vital matter. With this in mind, the aim of this paper will be to explore the way in which consideration of the vitalistic mode of semiotics that occurs in the context of animation - particulary with reference to the films of Cohl and Blackton - can provide a rich context for contemplating the operation and status of relations, as well as providing a canvas for phenomenal experimentation that might supplement to the mathematico-kinetic examples that Deleuze develops in his work on Leibniz's differential calculus - ultimately providing an alternative means of adressing a mode of being that is 'real without being actual and ideal without being abstract.'. (shrink)

This paper reports one theme – Expression of Identity – which emerged from a larger qualitative study. It suggests that existential philosophy offers an insight into the human condition which therapists incorporate into their world view and that choosing to be an existential therapist is a choice involving passion and commitment.

“Exciting things are happening at the Freud Museum London this summer. A century after Sigmund Freud’s revolutionary ideas reached a wider public, his final home, dedicated to preserving his legacy, has invited artists, designers, writers and performers to revisit Freud’s seminal paper The Unconscious Using a combination of psychological games, scientific and historical information and engaging displays and workshops, The Festival of the Unconscious will encourage visitors to think and learn about the unconscious mind and how it influences our behaviour. (...) The Museum will become a strange and mysterious place, where writings, objects and artistic works will offer insights into unconscious experience. Newly commissioned films by animators from Kingston University will weave through the house; sound and video installations by London-based art project Disinformation will occupy the dining room, and an installation by stage designers from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, inspired by the work of cosmologist Carlos Frenk, will spectacularly transform Freud’s study. Visitors can contemplate their own unconscious associations through a personal display developed by Julian Rothenstein, co-author of the best-selling ‘Psychobox’. Finally there will be the unique opportunity of reclining and free-associating on a psychoanalytic couch, in Freud’s bedroom. Artistic contributions include The Dream Collector by Melanie Manchot, a 5-channel synched video and sound installation filmed in Mexico City - on view for the first time in the UK. Collaborative artists Brass Art present a video piece which uses Kinect scanners to capture intimate-scaled performances in the museum with sound composed by Monty Adkins. Other works include ‘the unconscious project’ by art therapists teaching on the MA Art Psychotherapy course at Goldsmiths, University of London, while Sarah Ainslie and Martin Bladh will display works offering modern takes on the ‘Thematic Apperception Test’ and the Rorschach ink blot test.” Freud Museum. (shrink)

This conference brings together artists, curators and writers to examine the ways artists harness aspects of the uncanny and the unconscious in their navigation of physical and imagined spaces. Built around artists’ practices which have responded to the repressed, the unthought or the untold, and which employ fractured, dream-like or metamorphic narratives; the conference will mix keynote addresses with artist-in-conversations. Contributions from: Patricia Allmer, Rachel Anderson, Brass Art, Rebecca Fortnum, Pavel Pyś, Alison Rowley, Lindsay Seers, Daniel Silver, Saskia Olde Wolbers, (...) Rachel Withers. Keynote Lectures: Dr Alison Rowley 'Uncanny Returns and the Power of Laughter: Sarah Lucas at the Freud Museum' Dr Patricia Allmer 'Shadowdance - The Mobile Uncanny'. (shrink)

The debate concerning the legitimacy of artistic research that has taken place over the last two decades is notable for the way in which it has drawn attention to rival 'representational' and 'performative' images of thought. Early critics of practice-led research such as Durling, Friedman, Elkins and Biggs employed broadly representational arguments in a quasi-legal context of judgment to suggest that processes of artistic research were in some sense unrecognisable when an attempt was made to see them through the conceptual (...) lens of 'research'. In contrast to this, advocates of artistic research, such as Haseman, Bolt, Sullivan, Borgdorff and Slager have proposed that research arising out of artistic practice possesses distinctive qualities - conjoining interests in the experimental, the experiential, and the non-representational, with a set of predominantly transformative aims. For Deleuze, any act of thinking is guided by a pre-conceptual, aesthetic/stylistic ‘image’ that in some sense precedes it. Deleuze suggests that a particularly ‘dogmatic’ image of thought pervasively permeates the history of philosophy, and likewise serves to structure received notions of ‘common’ and ‘good’ sense. As such, it conditions the conceptual distribution into which things may fall, as well as the processes of practical reasoning which are typically employed in the judgment or disciplining of phenomena. Significantly, Deleuze positions taxomomic construction, scientific method, and legal adjudicative procedures as products of this image - all of which have figured prominently in the broadly positivistic criticism/contestation of artistic research. Perhaps because of the refractive, asymmetrical relationship between representational and performative images of thought, an interesting, and long running feature of the legitimacy debate has been the failing of participants on both sides of the discussion to critically engage with their opposition. In an attempt to address the lack of sustained critical confrontation between oppositional voices, this paper seeks to engage closely with a prominent sceptical position. To this end, the work of Michael Biggs and Daniela Büchler is interrogated from a conceptual, aesthetic and relational perspective, revealing its Wittgensteinian and Kantian roots, and subjecting them to critical scrutiny from the perspective of Deleuzian thought. The critique of Biggs and Büchler’s project is presented here in the spirit of Masummi’s conception of the example as an ‘odd beast’ – as that which enables an incisive and direct confrontation with a singular position, whilst functioning emblematically to address a much wider terrain. Thus Biggs and Büchler are positioned as avatars of a more generalised sceptical position, and their project as a prominent expression of the dogmatic image of thought. It is argued here that Biggs and Büchler’s resistance to the affective and the performative is pervasive, colouring their approach to philosophy, art and aesthetics and placing them at odds with the largely material-experiential, and transdisciplinary interests of many artistic researchers. With Deleuze’s stylistic and operatic conception of philosophy in mind a series of performative, aesthetico-conceptual strategies are developed in order to problematise Biggs and Büchler’s project - confronting a linguistic-pragmatism of the right with a Deleuzian process-pragmatism of the left. Keywords: Biggs and Büchler, Wittgenstein, Representation, Performativity, Image of Thought. (shrink)

The Philosopher and The Dancer is an act of spontaneous, solo, movement improvisation; offered here as one particularized instantiation and re-enactment of the corporeal situatedness and interrelatedness of self and world that characterizes Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. The improvisation can take place in any indoor studio/space, ideally with a suitable floor - the ostensibly static nature of an indoor space/place serving as a clear context for the embodiment and modeling of some of Merleau-Ponty’s core philosophical constructs. As an improvised event, The Philosopher (...) and The Dancer can last for a few minutes or for longer and is unaccompanied by music; it is the embodied weave of dancer and immediate environment - a cultivated sensitivity and practised responsiveness to one’s spatial and temporal inherence in a particular world - that is foregrounded. This demonstration/performance is offered as a place in which an alternative articulation of Merleau-Ponty’s thought will be evident. (shrink)

Bury Art Museum surveys international contemporary artists working with light and time. “The poetic beauty of Grazia Toderi’s enchanting cityscales, heavenly visions of human nights; a new installation of ‘The Air That Held Them’, giant inflating heads created by UK collective Brass Art, reflecting the precise measurements of the artists’ heads taken from biomedical facial scans and a new neon commission by leading British poet and text artist, Tony Lopez, questions who we are and how we are defined.”.

Ethnography per se offers insights into complex social processes and its potential has relevance for the increasingly difficult notion of 'leadership'. Understanding complex leadership situations from the perspective of serial narratives has the potential to reveal the ‘dark matter’ of leadership practice. Thin descriptions of ‘real time’ practice are more pervasive and plausible than the thick descriptions of observation and behaviourism. Auto-ethnography invites the practitioner to reveal how they, within a particular setting, create meanings around their leadership activity.

This paper replicates a previous study of how people give accounts of their experience after encountering an unusual and unpredictable event in their ordinary lives. Such accounts usually take the form of proto-narratives, which because of their link to an actual event are called contingent narratives. My previous study is extended in this paper by trying to theorize the processes involved. The key feature of these narratives is the ease with which people seem to use a narrative circumspection to making (...) sense of their experience. People draw upon their own tacit knowing to construct narratives to explain their experiences. Such tacit knowledge is available without conscious effort, it easily adapts to new contexts, and is particularly good at handling the unexpected. There is a widely held belief that tacit knowledge is difficult to capture and make explicit, but as is demonstrated in this study there is good evidence that humans have evolved a particularly efficient way of sharing the tacit through narrative thinking. My point is that tacit knowing and narrative thinking offer the key to understanding our experience of ordinary life. (shrink)

This article proposes to explore the variegated plays of concrete as a travelling concept through four specific examples, viewed from the locality of the Yorkshire Sculpture Triangle in 2015. It will be argued that ‘concrete’ makes possible a triangulated reading practice in, of and for sculpture. The first example looks to the use of concrete, as a material, in some of the ‘technical’ experiments of Henry Moore, from the 1920s-1930s. The second example is the only public concrete sculpture by Barbara (...) Hepworth on record, entitled Turning Forms. This is a kinetic work which was commissioned for the Festival of Britain in 1951. The psychic registrations of form-in-concrete will be explored through the aesthetic reception and understanding of these works. The third example examines the interplay between abstraction and concretion in a work of structural engineering: the Arqiva transmission tower on Emley Moor. This structure is a working utilitarian model of the telecommunications industry which took hold in the 1960s and 1970s. It is also a sculptural monument in a landscape of other design ‘types’. The fourth example considers the recent display of Lygia Clark’s Bichos at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, in 2014-2015. Bicho Pássaro do Espaço reveals a particular translation between concrete thinking and concrete experience. These examples call upon the semantics of the concrete as a thought process and will track a journey into a region marked by three interconnected points: the concrete specificity in the material works selected, the broader field of concrete forms within which the sculptural may sit and the philosophical/aesthetic language of concrete for sculpture. (shrink)

This interview took place at the National Arts Education Archive in November 2014. Whilst there is a necessary focus on Hester Reeve’s most recent project YMEDACA – a re-mapping of Yorkshire Sculpture Park through the features of Plato’s ‘Academos’ – the dialogue also moves its way through the archive’s important role in the process and formation of the project. We were keen to hold our discussion inside the archive itself; to allow the space to hold us while we negotiated the (...) terrain of sculptural thinking. This was our first meeting and what follows is a partial transcription of our three hour discussion. We would like our exchange to honour the 30 year anniversary of the NAEA. (shrink)

In What a Body Can Do, Ben Spatz develops, for the first time, a rigorous theory of embodied technique as knowledge. He argues that understanding technique as both training and research has much to offer current discussions around the role of practice in the university, including the debates around “practice as research.” Drawing on critical perspectives from the sociology of knowledge, phenomenology, dance studies, enactive cognition, and other areas, Spatz argues that technique is a major area of historical and ongoing (...) research in physical culture, performing arts, and everyday life. (shrink)

This work examines and attempts to overcome issues caused by the lack of formal standardisation when defining text categorisation techniques and detailing how they might be appropriately integrated with each other. Despite text categorisation’s long history the concept of automation is relatively new, coinciding with the evolution of computing technology and subsequent increase in quantity and availability of electronic textual data. Nevertheless insufficient descriptions of the diverse algorithms discovered have lead to an acknowledged ambiguity when trying to accurately replicate methods, (...) which has made reliable comparative evaluations impossible. Existing interpretations of general data mining and text categorisation methodologies are analysed in the first half of the thesis and common elements are extracted to create a distinct set of significant stages. Their possible interactions are logically determined and a unique universal architecture is generated that encapsulates all complexities and highlights the critical components. A variety of text related algorithms are also comprehensively surveyed and grouped according to which stage they belong in order to demonstrate how they can be mapped. The second part reviews several open-source data mining applications, placing an emphasis on their ability to handle the proposed architecture, potential for expansion and text processing capabilities. Finding these inflexible and too elaborate to be readily adapted, designs for a novel framework are introduced that focus on rapid prototyping through lightweight customisations and reusable atomic components. Being a consequence of inadequacies with existing options, a rudimentary implementation is realised along with a selection of text categorisation modules. Finally a series of experiments are conducted that validate the feasibility of the outlined methodology and importance of its composition, whilst also establishing the practicality of the framework for research purposes. The simplicity of experiments and results gathered clearly indicate the potential benefits that can be gained when a formalised approach is utilised. (shrink)

This text is a commentary on the nature of my principle artistic preoccupations over a period of research-creation spanning 2011 and 2013. The works discussed cover, each in their own way, various approaches to sound composition linked to physical objects. In effect, the object proves to be a fundamental element at the heart of discourse, which, though anchored in sound, is often multi-disciplinary. The object here is thus taken apart in its affective, conceptual, performative, visual, as well as sonic properties. (...) The first part of this text illustrates the nature of the relationship between the physical object and the works submitted for this doctoral thesis. It focuses on the journey of the works: from their genesis in the artist’s collections of objects to their life on stage where the objects are used as visual elements in a performative context. The second part is dedicated to the conceptual and aesthetic content of the works, from which flow the principal elements of their discourse. Here, the relationships between the work, the concept and the sonic material are established, which together make up their aesthetic. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy’s writings on philosophy, politics, aesthetics, and religion have contributed to the development of contemporary French thought and helped shape the field of continental philosophy. This volume succeeds in highlighting the ongoing relevance, indeed urgency, of Nancy’s philosophical project ‘now’, writes Jodie Matthews.

Dr Rowan Bailey will lead an 'In Conversation' with sculptor Sheila Gaffney in the exhibition Class Forms @ Leeds College of Art Gallery Friday 16th January 3 -5pm. This is part of a Centre for Sculptural Thinking Event.

This Writing-PAD discussion forum and workshop event is designed to stimulate collaborative conversations and exchanges, in and around the archive, with a view to developing a clear set of concepts and approaches, abstracts and ideas, contributing towards a guest edited issue in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice. A call for issue will be formulated as part of this event, based on the ideas generated out of the forum. As a way to stimulate re-writings of the archive, the forum (...) will provide an opportunity for you to bring your own archival experiences to the table for discussion. We invite you to join us if you are keen to explore different approaches and styles of writing that resonate with the ‘archival’ as a concept and as a practice. This collaborative event will shape and form the directives of the guest-edited issue. Resources on the topic of the archive and workshop activities will be provided. Themes for exploration: Writing with and through the archive, expanding the field of the archive as a creative concept, experimental uses of the archive in art and design making, material engagements with the past and formations for the future, geographic site as archival resource, fictions of the archive and storytelling, digital platforms, coding and de-coding materiality, creative systems of classification, co-creation in the archive, design innovations through the use of company archives, exploring relationships between copyright, intellectual property and appropriation, archival interplays between materials and things, the public archive versus the domestic archive, the studio as archive, making histories and futures through creative practice, identifying archival inheritances in art and design, working with art education archives, teaching archival interventions within the context of art, design and architecture, and fostering inter/multi/trans-disciplinary encounters in the archive. (shrink)

The ROTOЯ partnership between Huddersfield Art Gallery and the University of Huddersfield was established in 2011. ROTOЯ I and II was a programme of eight exhibitions and accompanying events that commenced in 2012 and was completed in 2013. ROTOЯ continues into 2014 and the programme for 2015 and 2016 is already firmly underway. In brief, the aim of ROTOЯ is to improve the cultural vitality of Kirklees, expand audiences, and provide new ways for people to engage with and understand academic (...) research in contemporary art and design. Why ROTOЯ, Why Now? As Vice Chancellors position their institutions’ identities and future trajectories in context to national and international league tables, Professor John Goddard1 proposes the notion of the ‘civic’ university as a ‘place embedded’ institution; one that is committed to ‘place making’ and which recognises its responsibility to engaging with the public. The civic university has deep institutional connections to different social, cultural and economic spheres within its locality and beyond. A fundamental question for both the university sector and cultural organisations alike, including local authority, is how the many different articulations of public engagement and cultural leadership which exist can be brought together to form one coherent, common language. It is critical that we reach out and engage the community so we can participate in local issues, impact upon society, help to forge well-being and maintain a robust cultural economy. Within the lexicon of public centered objectives sits the Arts Council England’s strategic goals, and those of the Arts and Humanities Research Council – in particular its current Cultural Value initiative. What these developments reveal is that art and design education and professional practice, its projected oeuvre as well as its relationship to cultural life and public funding, is now challenged with having to comprehensively audit its usefulness in financially austere times. It was in the wake of these concerns coming to light, and of the 2010 Government Spending Review that ROTOЯ was conceived. These issues and the discussions surrounding them are not completely new. Research into the social benefits of the arts, for both the individual and the community, was championed by the Community Arts Movement in the 1960s. During the 1980s and ‘90s, John Myerscough and Janet Wolff, amongst others, provided significant debate on the role and value of the arts in the public domain. What these discussions demonstrated was a growing concern that the cultural sector could not, and should not, be understood in terms of economic benefit alone. Thankfully, the value of the relationships between art, education, culture and society is now recognised as being far more complex than the reductive quantification of their market and GDP benefits. Writing in ‘Art School ’, Ernesto Pujol proposes:‘…it is absolutely crucial that art schools consider their institutional role in support of democracy. The history of creative expression is linked to the history of freedom. There is a link between the state of artistic expression and the state of democracy.’ When we were approached by Huddersfield Art Gallery to work collaboratively on an exhibition programme that could showcase academic staff research, one of our first concerns was to ask the question, how can we really contribute to cultural leadership within the town?’ The many soundbite examples of public engagement that we might underline within our annual reports or website news are one thing, but what really makes a difference to a town’s cultural identity, and what affects people in their daily lives? With these questions in mind we sought a distinctive programme within the muncipal gallery space, that would introduce academic research in art, design and architecture beyond the university in innovative ways. (shrink)

Available in English for the first time, this publication from Slavoj Žižek represents a re-worked version of one of his earliest works. Hard to place amongst his recent works, perhaps the purpose of publishing this early work is to make us realise that the 1980s Žižek was already then the one we have come to recognise, just as the content of the book retroactively makes Hegel a Lacanian avant la lettre, writes Jodie Matthews.

Not for the first time, the banks and other financial institutions have got themselves – and the rest of us – into a mess, this time on an unprecedented financial and geographical scale. It is no surprise that opinions about causes, consequences and cures abound with ethical issues, as well as technical and economic concerns, a focus of attention. It is to be hoped that useful lessons for the future will be learned. In this chapter, however, we step back from (...) a direct engagement with the stated ills of the financial system itself, whether actual or perceived, chronic or acute. Our starting point is that crisis in the financial system not only makes us stop and think; but it might also, particularly under conditions of moral panic, prevent us from thinking well. Our contention is that a further impediment to thinking well about financial crises is the lack of a substantial body of academic knowledge that might be termed ‘financial ethics’ – a corpus of well developed conceptual insights and appropriate empirical evidence. We identify some of the reasons for this situation and proffer some suggestions regarding what might be done to remedy it – including the development of knowledge that is as relevant to everyday practices during periods of normality as it is to providing perspectives on crisis. The chapter is structured as follows: the next section provides a perspective on debate during times of crisis; the middle section seeks to explain why academic financial ethics is not a significant constituent element of debate on the financial crisis post-2007; and the final two main sections explore ways in which an academic agenda for financial ethics might be constructed. In a curious way this chapter echoes some of the themes and especially the conclusion of David Bevan’s chapter in this work although the reasoning to the conclusion that finance ethics is an empty set follows a rather different Badiou-inspired path in chapter 18. (shrink)

The value of tension is often underestimated. While it may be the case that tension causes destruction and harm, it is equally likely that it can open up new avenues for creation, adaption, and change. Tension can be used as a conceptual tool for thinking about the moments when bodies collide with time and space, and each makes its presence known. It is in tension that we see moments of opportunity arise. Body Tensions explores these moments through the use of (...) cross-chapter dialogue between inter-disciplinary and internationally located authors. Focusing on expressing and transgressing body tensions, the authors consider issues such as how humans embody time and space; where the limits of corporeality lie; and in what ways humans are able to re-imagine their bodies, environments, and cultures. (shrink)

There is a philosophy attached to the sporting body that ascertains that the sporting act results in a positive balance within the participants mind. With the process and act of channel swimming, the body moves from this initially ethical position to an aesthetic position that culminates in the spectacle of the enduring act, the swim. While the swim lacks an obvious audience, the performance is documented through time-based means sharing similar processes to the time-based documentation of Performance Art. The reception (...) of the channel swimming video is celebrated and disseminated via the global audience of the web as a staged event. During a channel swim the body is in a natural state, free from the technology of enhancing equipment, evidencing the physical capabilities of the swimmer. The repeated and learned practice and behaviours of training techniques such as acclimatisation subject the body to extremes and demand that it adapts and becomes a fluid natural body. Magdalinki’s discussion around the physiological body and how processes of bodily changes and adaption have to be earned within sport will be discussed in relation to swimwear rules and how the use of technology is viewed as challenging. The discussion draws on my 2012 film work Acclimatisation, a short art film documenting the body’s reactions to habituation. (shrink)

This 15-minute moved and spoken paper investigates strategies for grounding solo movement improvisation - as both a research and performance form - in a dynamic interplay between body and environment. The paper explores the sensations and impulses of the speaking/dancing body as they are entwined with the environment, enfolded within the architectural space of studio/venue and also, more deeply and widely, responsive to the ‘particularity of what is outside and around’. Drawing on French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological understanding of the (...) ‘me other exchange’ of the individual and her surrounds as a pragmatic and theoretical platform, the paper enquires into the role of the senses - particularly vision, touch and kinesthesia as an interwoven sensory network - in the genesis and development of movement. What is the phenomenal sense of seeding and shaping movement by attending and responding to what is both within and around the dancing body? How can the dancer attune to and locate herself on this continuum between internal impulse and external sensation/stimulus? Investigating this ‘me other exchange’ of body and environment further, the paper asks to what extent cultivating relationality and responsiveness to space/place might in turn facilitate dispositional qualities of openness, adaptability and, perhaps, resilience more widely. If solo movement improvisation can be efficaciously framed as a way of moving in relation with the world and if, as improviser Kent De Spain notes, ‘the world is improvising too; and that dance, your interaction with the world, forms you just as you form the world’, to what extent can movement improvisation enhance an individual’s capacity to adroitly and adeptly change, alter, pause or progress in response to the world’s ever-shifting vicissitudes? References De Spain, Kent. ‘The Cutting Edge of Awareness: Reports From the Inside of Improvisation’. In: Cooper Albright, Ann and Gere, David. Taken By Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Tufnell, Miranda and Crickmay, Chris. A widening field: journeys in body and imagination. Alton: Dance Books. (shrink)